Amanderella and the Mystery of the Silent Statue.Chapter 7.

Chapter Seven.

 

Opening Doors.

 

Amanderella walked slowly along the landing, studying the wall with deliberate care. Sir Cottam followed, trying to see whatever she was seeing. The wall was very similar to the panelled hall downstairs: lined with the same neat mouldings, skirting, dado, picture rail, all painted the same calm, unremarkable white. Perfect camouflage for a man who enjoyed hiding things in plain sight.

She paused, then looked down at the carpet. It ran in a narrow strip along the centre of the landing, worn thin in places. Amanderella retraced her steps to the bathroom door and knelt to examine the weave more closely.

Sir Cottam hovered, puzzled. “What are you looking for?”

“The most frequently used path,” she said. “People walk the same routes every day without thinking. And carpets remember.”

She ran her fingers lightly over the pile.

“The bathroom is the one honest door on this floor. From here, the most‑used room would leave the clearest trail. Werlyn’s bedroom. The wear will show us which way he walked.”

She stood up, her eyes tracking the line of the wall.

“Six windows,” she said, counting them off in her head. “The first four must belong to the bedrooms. Then there’s the little dressing room or box room. And the last one is the window we saw beside the servants’ stairs, leading up to the attic.”

Sir Cottam peered at the smooth, white woodwork. “Well, that accounts for the windows, certainly. But it doesn’t give us a handle to turn.”

“The carpet will,” Amanderella replied.

She walked past the first section of panelling, where Bedroom One ought to be, and noted that the carpet weave was still relatively thick. She moved further along the corridor, passing the place where Bedroom Two should lie. Then she stopped.

Right where the wall ought to open into Bedroom Three, the narrow strip of carpet showed a distinct, heavy curve of wear, the unmistakable arc left by the pivot of a man’s heel making a sharp left turn into what appeared to be blank panelling.

Amanderella’s eyes brightened. “There,” she said softly. “That’s the path he walked every day.” She turned to Sir Cottam. “About how tall was Werlyn?”

He looked at her, “Say, about your height. Why?”

She smiled and pressed the panel in front of her where a man of her height would naturally rest his fingers. She pressed.

The panel moved back a fraction, no more than the thickness of a coin, and then released with a soft, well‑oiled sigh. The hidden door swung inward as smoothly as if it had been opened only yesterday.

“Push‑to‑open catch,” she said. “Very common in hotels. Werlyn chose the simplest mechanism for the room he used most.”

“You are the most amazing of women,” said Sir Cottam. Sir Cottam drew in a slow breath. “His room,” he murmured, as though the words themselves required care.

Amanderella nodded once, her expression softening. “Yes. And he meant us to find it.”

They stepped into a room that felt suddenly, startlingly intimate.

The bed was neatly made, the counterpane smoothed with the kind of care that suggested someone had expected him home. A book lay face down on the bedside table, marking a page he would never return to. His slippers waited beneath the bed, toes aligned.

The rest of the room was a quiet chaos of Werlyn’s obsessive collecting. There were no rare treasures or priceless antiques here. Instead, every flat surface was piled high with worthless bits and bobs. There were stacks of chipped willow-pattern saucers, a box filled entirely with rusty keys that fit no known locks, several broken alarm clocks with their springs popping out, and a mountain of old tram tickets tied up with string. A single, glass-fronted cabinet on the wall didn't hold fine china, but was packed to the gills with mismatched glass marbles and sea shells. It was the bedroom of a man who thought that everything he bought was valuable and had to be kept.

On the chest of drawers sat a small Cayman, or what, at first glance, pretended to be one. Amanderella leaned closer, frowning. The proportions were wrong: the snout too blunt, the tail too stiff, the legs set at angles no living creature would tolerate.

She touched it lightly with one fingertip.

Instead of cool, pebbled reptile skin, she felt the unmistakable resistance of stiff cardboard under a layer of thick, glossy paint.

“This isn’t a Cayman,” she murmured. “It’s not even a good imitation. I should know. I saw enough of them when I was in Brazil.”

Sir Cottam stared around the room, his jaw dropping slightly. "Good heavens. I always thought he was a man of poor taste. This looks like the back room of a junk shop."

Amanderella picked up a brass button from a pile on the chest of drawers, turning it over in her fingers. “It does rather. I begin to feel sorry for him.”

Sir Cottam was still staring at the cayman. “Surely even Werlyn would have realised that this was a fake. It is so obviously made of cardboard. He may have had poor taste, but he was not stupid.”

Amanderella set the creature down gently.

“No, he wasn’t stupid,” she said. “Which means he kept this for a reason.”

Sir Cottam blinked. “A reason?”

“You said that Werlyn never threw anything away,” Amanderella said, “but he didn’t put everything in his bedroom. This”—she tapped the stiff cardboard flank—“was important to him. Or useful. Or both.”

She glanced around the room again, her eyes narrowing thoughtfully.

“Nothing in here is valuable,” she murmured. “So, the value must be hidden.”

She shook the false cayman. It rattled. She held it upside down and shook it again. Something fell out on to the floor. Sir Cottam picked it up. “Another one of those brass button things,” he said and put it down on the pile on the chest of drawers.

Amanderella frowned. “Odd that there should be a brass button inside that awful cayman.”

“Sorry,” said Sir Cottam. He rummaged through the pile. “They all look the same.”

Amanderella watched him for a moment, then reached out to pick up the one that had fallen from the cayman.

She held it between finger and thumb.

“This isn’t a button,” she said quietly.

Sir Cottam froze. “What do you mean? It looks like a button.”

“It only looks like one.” She placed it beside the others on the chest of drawers. “See? These are all identical. Same size, same weight, same dull finish. But this one—”

She picked it up again and tapped it lightly against her teeth.

Sir Cottam winced. “Must you?”

“It’s lighter,” she said. “Much lighter. And listen.”

She flicked it with her fingernail.

A faint, hollow tink answered her.

Sir Cottam blinked. “Good heavens. It’s empty?”

“Not empty,” Amanderella murmured. “Hollow.”

“Goodness,” exclaimed Sir Cottam, “Do be careful. I read about a button like that in one of the magazines. The Strand, or perhaps Tit-Bits. It was a grand exposé on the international smuggling trade! The scoundrels would hide secret, coded dispatches inside hollow livery buttons to slip them past the customs officers at Dover. They called them 'The Whispering Buttons'!”

He leaned in closer, his eyes wide behind his spectacles. “Do you suppose Werlyn was involved in a secret network of continental smugglers?”

Amanderella managed to keep her face entirely serious. “While the image of Werlyn running contraband across the English Channel is a thoroughly delightful one, Sir Cottam, I suspect his motives were purely domestic.”

She turned the light button over in her palm, looking for a seam. “But it proves your point. He wasn't stupid at all. He knew precisely how to hide a secret message in plain sight, by dropping it into a pile of rubbish where no sensible lawyer would ever think to look. This a container. A very small, very deliberate container.”

Sir Cottam peered at it again, as though hoping it might apologise for alarming him. “Still seems a queer thing to hide inside a cardboard reptile.”

“Queer, yes,” Amanderella said. “But not nasty. I think he hid things in the objects he handled every day. This room is full of nonsense, but the nonsense is arranged. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

She turned it over. On the underside, almost invisible unless you knew to look, was a tiny groove, a seam.

Sir Cottam leaned in. “Is that… a lid?”

Amanderella nodded. “A very small one.”

She pressed her thumbnail into the groove. The top lifted with a soft snap, revealing a scrap of paper curled inside like a seed in a pod.

Amanderella tipped it into her palm and unfolded it.

Three words stared up at her in neat, spidery handwriting:

Press the shadow---

She frowned slightly.

“Odd,” she murmured.

Sir Cottam leaned in. ““That’s Werlyn’s handwriting. I recognise it. What is odd about it?”

“It’s incomplete,” Amanderella said. “He’s ended on dash. That means there is more to the instruction, but not here.”

Sir Cottam blinked. “You mean he expects us to find the rest?”

“Yes,” she said. “This is only the first half.”

She folded the paper again, thoughtful.

Sir Cottam blinked. “What on earth does it mean?”

Amanderella looked slowly around the cluttered room.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Yet.”

Sir Cottam stared. “But… but why disguise it as a button? And why hide it inside that dreadful cardboard reptile?”

“Because,” she said softly, “Werlyn hid things in plain sight. And he trusted that no one would ever look closely at the things they thought were worthless.”

She closed the tiny lid and set the hollow “button” apart from the others.

“And he was right.”

Sir Cottam was still looking faintly rattled by his own imagination, but he rallied himself with a brisk sniff.

“Well,” he said, “if the will is anywhere, it must be in here. Bedrooms are where people keep important papers. Under the mattress, in drawers, behind pictures—”

Amanderella shook her head.

“I doubt it.  That would have been too obvious.”

She crossed to the bed and lifted the counterpane with careful fingers. The sheets beneath were crisp, freshly laundered, and entirely undisturbed.

“This was ready for his night’s rest,” she murmured, “but he went to eternal rest first.”

Sir Cottam bent to peer under the bed.

“Nothing but slippers. And dust. Good heavens, how does dust get everywhere?”

Amanderella ignored him. She checked the bedside table, the drawer beneath it, the book lying face down, the lamp base, the skirting board, the carpet edge, the chair sagging under Werlyn’s curiosities.

Nothing.

She moved to the chest of drawers. Each drawer slid open smoothly, revealing socks, handkerchiefs, oddments, a cracked photograph frame, a broken fountain pen, a tin of collar studs.

But no papers. No envelope. No folded document.

Sir Cottam hovered anxiously.

“Perhaps he hid it behind a picture?”

Amanderella lifted the only framed print from the wall. The wallpaper behind it was unmarked, the nail undisturbed.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t hide anything here.”

Sir Cottam blinked.

“But… but this is his bedroom. Surely—”

“Bedrooms are for sleeping,” Amanderella said quietly. “And this one was kept ready for him. Too ready. Too tidy. Too untouched.”

She stepped back, surveying the room with a slow, thoughtful sweep of her eyes.

“If he hid the will,” she said, “he hid it somewhere he used, not somewhere he merely slept.”

Sir Cottam swallowed.

“Then… it isn’t here?”

“No,” she said. “Not in this room.”

She picked up the hollow ‘button’ again, weighing it in her palm.

“He left us a clue here,” she said. “But not the will.”

She unfolded the scrap of paper once more, reading the three spidery words again

Press the shadow-

Amanderella slipped the clue safely into her pocket.

“Come along, Sir Cottam,” she said, heading for the door. “We’re looking for a shadow that isn’t a shadow.”

Sir Cottam followed her out, glancing nervously at the cardboard cayman as he passed.